After two plane journeys I’m halfway there!
I’ve just arrived at the Cruz del Sur bus station in Lima, where I have about 4 hours to wait until my bus will whisk me away at breakneck speed on a 21 hour roadtrip.
I met a few people on the way here who were talking about how amazing the VIP seats on the Cruz del Sur buses are, and showed me a few pictures from a leaflet they had. You pay the equivalent of an extra four or five quid and get a lazyboy chair on the first floor of the bus, a nice view of the television and great service. I made my reservation a few days ago online with the help of a friend in Lima, but not realising the differences between VIP seats and the regular variety ones – I assumed it was just a different floor and a little more legroom, I opted for an upstairs seat, which looks a bit more like an ordinary UK bus chair.
Oh well! C’est la vie, or whatever it is the Spanish say. Google tells me it’s “Así es la vida”. I didn’t exactly come here looking for luxury, anyway. One thing I’ve realised already from my short time in the country is that there is less English than I expected. I wanted to come somewhere where I’d be forced to pick up the local language and speak it, which is one reason I came further out to Peru rather than visiting the Spanish mainland. However, I expected to be able to get by with just English if I had to, at least in the capital, Lima. Instead I’ve been awkwardly flicking through my lonelyplanet phrasebook desperately trying to put together a sentence that actually makes… sense.
My taxi ride to the bus station – it’s pretty far out from the airport as there’s no nationalised system; even though travel by bus is the most common even for long distance in Peru, buses are operated by various private companies so their offices are just spread out randomly over the city – was an opportunity to see what the driving standards are like here. Well, they’re far better than those in Thailand, which is about the nicest thing I can say. Driving seems like a bit of a game here, everyone trying to nudge through the traffic, cheekily threatening to drive into each other and honking sporadically. Quite fun but I doubt I’ll be renting a car!
It was a rather long journey though, as there was quite a lot of traffic as well, but I tried to make it a bit more interesting by talking with the driver who’s actually a friend of a friend here in Lima. I spent about a minute trying to put together a semi-legititmate sentence only to be met by a reply I couldn’t start to comprehend. I just kept replying with “Sí” and hoped for the best, but for all I know I could have been agreeing with anything.
I still have three hours to burn till I can board my luxurious coach, so maybe I’ll go watch the traffic (there isn’t a whole lot else to see in the capital city of Lima, from the looks of things) and try and learn some Spanish, or as they call it here ‘castellano’.
¡Hasta luego!
Tommy
Woo Tommy!!